These one-dimensional autobiographical fragments of girlhood, young adulthood, and a crumbling marriage are exercises in mere recollection, mostly lacking the reflection or the narrative drive to make them worthwhile. There are many reasons a writer's life stories can be interesting to other people. After reading Beard's, it's not easy to remember what they are. Excepting occasional jarring particles of portentousness (``Here is a scene,'' Beard instructs in ``Cousins'') and lapses into a voice embarrassingly reminiscent of a corny newspaper humor column, Beard's recollections usually hit just one note. It's one of childlike wonder, whether the stories take place in her childhood or not. A group of elements recur with an all-too-comforting familiarity—a favorite song played on a car tape deck (or on a Walkman or at a concert), an imaginary friend, a beloved dog, the moon. All are rendered with a generic lyricism consisting largely of the rampant manufacture of similes. Self-doubt and inner conflict don't much figure. External conflict, most notably a marriage that comes to an end, comes across largely as an intrusion into this otherwise unperturbed field of view. Fortunately, in one piece, and in parts of a couple of others, Beard's meandering recall runs into events that transcend the confines of her practiced style. ``Waiting'' juxtaposes two narratives of her mother's death: the December days when she and her sister took turns attending at the hospital and, with what remaining time they had, shopping for funeral arrangements. And in ``The Family Hour,'' Beard uses a lighter touch to give an original account of a familiar situation in memoirs—a childhood with a father who drinks. Were more of her memoirs to display the focus glimpsed in those pieces, they would be the makings of an impressive first book. (Part of this volume appeared in the New Yorker, and Beard is the recipient of a 1997 Whiting Award.)
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-08554-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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